Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?
by Bryan Alexander
Bryan Alexander is Director for Research at
the National Institute for Technology and
Liberal Education (NITLE). Comments on
this article can be sent to the author at <bryan.
alexander@nitle.org>.
The term is audacious: Web 2.0. It
assumes a certain interpretation of Web
history, including enough progress in
certain directions to trigger a succes-
sion. The label casts the reader back to
Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s unleashing of the
World Wide Web concept a little more
than a decade ago, then asks: What forms
of the Web have developed and become
accepted enough that we can conceive of
a transition to new ones?
Many people—including, or perhaps
especially, supporters—critique the “Web
2.0” moniker for definitional reasons. Few
can agree on even the general outlines of
Web 2.0. It is about no single new
development. Moreover, the term
is often applied to a heterogeneous
mix of relatively familiar and also
very emergent technologies. The
former may appear as very much
“Web 1.0,” and the latter may be
seen as too evanescent to be relied
on for serious informatics work.
Indeed, one leading exponent of
this movement deems continuous
improvement to be a hallmark of
such projects, which makes pin-
ning down their identities even more
difficult.1 Yet we can survey the ground
traversed by Web 2.0 projects and discus-
sions in order to reveal a diverse set of
digital strategies with powerful implica-
tions for higher education.2 Ultimately,
the label “Web 2.0” is far less important
than the concepts, projects, and practices
included in its scope.
Notes
1. Tim O’Reilly, “What Is Web 2.0,” September 30, 2005, tim.oreilly.com, <http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html>.
2. Stephen O’Hear, “Seconds Out, Round Two,” The Guardian, November 15, 2005, <http://education.guardian.co.uk/elearning/story/0,10577,1642281,00.html>.
3. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX>. See also Janice Fraser, “It’s a Whole New Internet,” Adaptive Path, April 21, 2005, <http://www.adaptivepath.com/publi-
cations/essays/archives/000430.php>.
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Concepts
Social software has emerged as a major
component of the Web 2.0 movement.
The idea dates as far back as the 1960s
and JCR Licklider’s thoughts on using
networked computing to connect people
in order to boost their knowledge and
their ability to learn. The Internet tech-
nologies of the subsequent generation
have been profoundly social, as listservs,
Usenet groups, discussion software,
groupware, and Web-based communities
have linked people around the world.
During the past few years, a group of
Web projects and services became per-
ceived as especially connective, receiving
the rubric of “social software”: blogs,
wikis, trackback, podcasting, videoblogs,
and enough social networking tools
like MySpace and Facebook to give rise
to an abbreviation mocking their very
prevalence: YASN (Yet Another Social
Network). Consider the differences
between these and static or database-
driven Web pages. Wikis are all about
user modification; CNN’s front page is
decisively not. It is true that blogs are
Web pages, but their reverse-chronologi-
cal structure implies a different rhetorical
purpose than a Web page, which has no
inherent timeliness. That altered rhetoric
helped shape a different audience, the
blogging public, with its emergent social
practices of blogrolling, extensive hyper-
linking, and discussion threads attached
not to pages but to content chunks within
them. Reading and searching this world
is significantly different from searching
the entire Web world. Still, social software
does not indicate a sharp break with the
old but, rather, the gradual emergence of
a new type of practice.
These sections of the Web break away
from the page metaphor. Rather than fol-
lowing the notion of the Web as book,
they are predicated on microcontent.
Blogs are about posts, not pages. Wikis
are streams of conversation, revision,
amendment, and truncation. Podcasts
are shuttled between Web sites, RSS
feeds, and diverse players. These con-
tent blocks can be saved, summarized,
addressed, copied, quoted, and built into
new projects. Browsers respond to
this boom in microcontent with
bookmarklets in toolbars, letting
users fling something from one
page into a Web service that yields
up another page. AJAX-style pages
feed content bits into pages with-
out reloading them, like the frames
of old but without such blatant
seams. They combine the widely
used, open XML standard with
Java functions.3 Google Maps is a
popular example of this, smoothly
drawing directional information and satel-
lite imagery down into a browser.
Like social software, microcontent has
been around for a while. Banner ads, for
example, are often imported by one site
from another directory. Collaboratively
designed Web pages sometimes aggregate
content created by different teams over
a staggered timeline. And if we consider
e-mail messages, discussion-board posts,
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 Web 2.0: New Wave for Innovation for
Teaching and Learning?
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Usenet-hosted images, and text messages
to be microcontent, then users have gener-
ated this material for decades. But Web
2.0 builds on this original microcontent
drive, with users developing Web content,
often collaboratively and often open to the
world. Moreover, technical innovations
suggest still further refinements in micro-
content. Arnaud Leene outlines a series of
characteristics, including variable licenses,
feeds, Web APIs, and single identity.4
This openness is crucial to current Web
2.0 discussions. The flow of microcontent
between domains, servers, and machines
depends on two-way access. Web 2.0 can
break on silos but thrive in shared ser-
vices. Still, silos and shared services are
not mutually exclusive. Amazon.com, for
instance, lets users harvest ISBN num-
bers from its listings but does not allow
access to a customer’s shopping cart. Some
wiki platforms allow users to lock down
pages from editing or restrict access to
authorized users, as does the popular blog
service LiveJournal. Yet openness remains
a hallmark of this emergent movement,
both ideologically and technologically.
Openness and microcontent combine into
a larger conceptual strand of Web 2.0,
one that sees users as playing more of a
foundational role in information architec-
ture. Drawing on the “wisdom of crowds”
argument, Web 2.0 services respond more
deeply to users than Web 1.0 services.
A leading form of this is a controversial
new form of metadata, the folksonomy.
Whereas traditional metadata is usually
hierarchical (topics nested within topics),
structured (e.g., the fields within Dublin
Core), and predetermined by content
authorities, folksonomic metadata consists
of words that users generate and attach
to content. A historian photographs the
Waterloo battlefield, uploads the result to
Flickr or 23, and adds keywords meaning-
ful to her: Napoleon, Wellington, Blucher,
1815. A literature scholar creates similar
images but tags them according to his
interests: Thackeray, Hugo, Clarke.
Why does this matter, and why do such
projects not degenerate into multisubjec-
tive chaos? First, users actually use tags.
Folksonomic services fill up with tags
rapidly enough to make information
professionals take notice. Second,
Web 2.0 services tend to provide
tools for helping users with their
folksonomies. Tags can be arranged
into concept maps called “tag
clouds,” which allow revisualiza-
tion of the way one considers one’s
work.5 The social bookmarking
innovator del.icio.us automati-
cally reminds users of previously
deployed tags, suggests some tags,
and notes tags used by others.
Third, people tend to tag socially.
That is, they learn from other tag-
gers and respond to other, published
groups of tags, or “tagsets.”6 There
are of course limitations to folkson-
omies, including the difficulty in
scaling up tags from several to many
users and the problem of quickly
grasping contextual shifts between
tagsets. But the rapid adoption and
growth of folksonomies is notewor-
thy. Popularly created metadata is a rarity.
Yet as of February 2006, tag-centric Flickr
hosts 100 million images.7
Bryan Alexander, “Web 2.0: A New Wave of
Innovation for Teaching and
Learning?” EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41,
no. 2 (March/April 2006): 32-44.
Copyright 2006, Bryan Alexander.
Reprinted with permission from the
author.

Notes
4. Arnaud Leene, “Web 2.0 Checklist 2.0,” MicroContent Musings, July 21, 2005, <http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/blog/web_20_checklist_20/>.
5. For examples, see the following: the BBC “What People Are Saying in England” display, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/england/TSP>; Casey Bisson’s library experiment,
<http://www.plymouth.edu/library/prototype/clusteredopac.php?srchtype=X&k=sociology+of+education>; a Washington Post headline cloud, <http://www.revsys.com/
newscloud/>; or TagCloud.com’s samples, <http://www.tagcloud.com/index.php>.
6. Clay Shirky, “Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags,” Clay Shirky’s Writings about the Internet, <http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.
html>.
7. Noted first by Hans Kullin in his Media Culpa blog, <http://www.kullin.net/arkiv/2006_02_01_mc.html#113999533755894760>.

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